Acceptable Collateral Damage

A minor technical note, if you would – I’m building Mozilla from source these days for my own amusement, and I’ve had these problems with it that I should probably document. And some of you out there in internet-land might be asking yourselves the same questions, like “If I upgrade to Snow Leopard, and I’m heavily invested in MacPorts, what happens?” or “I followed the instructions and it didn’t work, double-yew-tee-eff?” So, here you go. I’ll put them up on the wiki in a few moments.

The short version is: when you upgrade to Snow Leopard you need to rebuild your dev environment from scratch. Otherwise you get a lot of spurious errors from MacPorts (no libiconv, can’t make executables, no perls, etc) that are all basically lies. Do not get fooled into playing whackamole with the MacPorts errors; that is not the way. Purge and rebuild.

The long version is as follows:

If you have the Leopard XCode package installed, the Snow Leopard installer won’t touch it; you need to go back to the DVD and get Snow Leopard’s XCode package out of the Optional Installs, or you’ll start getting “compiler cannot create executables” errors, or something very much like that. Obvious! But I declare it also “easy to overlook” because I overlooked it and doing so was, in hindsight, pretty easy.

Some of these steps might be unnecessary – if you’re working with the latest version of MacPorts “selfupdate” won’t do anything, for example – but this fix works for me. Now you can go back to step 3 of the OSX Prerequisites page and follow along, and it will work as advertised.